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Exurbia
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The first day I had a set of wheels I drove straight to
the wrong side of I-10 to find something bleak. While manicured Palm Springs,
Palm Desert and the rest of the Palms to the south boast gated communities, rampant cosmetic
surgery, golf clubs and the occasional Rolls Royce, the bleached hell holes north of the interstate mostly endure or so it appears to me. I don’t photograph the banal and pretty. Give me hardscrabble and barely hanging on every time. I wouldn’t want to live there
but can suffer a brief interlude in hades to get the shot.
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Fully loaded, Thousand Palms. |
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Exercise Caution. Contents Highly Flammable. Thousand Palms. |
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A mighty small lock for that much gas. Thousand Palms, |
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Five miles west of Thousand Palms is the biggest wind farm west of Texas. There's a sinister sci-fi element to these behemoths. |
All but one of these images hale from Thousand Palms and its industrial wasteland hosting all manner of discarded goods, a gypsum plant, a petroleum
storage facility and to its west the largest wind farm west of Texas. A fella longs to get out of Thousand Palms once the work is done.
I have a long-standing series called “At the edge of what’s
left’ or “The edge of what’s left.” Some of these will join that august body or
become pioneers in the nascent “Next to Nothing” portfolio.
2 comments:
Given the fact that last October, we charged our car at midnight in Fenner, and also in Mojave with its windmills, we totally identify with your Sunburned blog, and possible Next to Nothing portfolio. There is something enticing about that desert, despite the fact that it can be equally beautiful and depressing simultaneously. A little like the answer T. E. Lawrence gave about his attraction to the desert - "It's clean." Thanks, Steve, for the Monday view!
Yep! Just as I remember it but composed more artfully.
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